ForwardX raises $10 million for AI-powered luggage that follows you

Autonomous luggage maker ForwardX Robotics today announced it has raised $10 million to bring its suitcase Ovis to market. At $399, the luggage can move a maximum 6.2 miles per hour and will ship to its first customers in late 2018. ForwardX was founded in 2016, but its luggage initially grabbed the world’s attention in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018 in Las Vegas.

The 9.9 lb suitcase is made of polypropylene and carbon fiber and is able to follow you by deploying computer vision that tracks your body and face, even if you are momentarily out of sight. Though Ovis has been tested and found to be useful in environments outside airports, like city streets, its battery only lasts for four hours of use, and it must be switched to the old-fashioned manual mode on escalators since it cannot yet handle moving stairs.

CloudQuant Thoughts… Been there, Done that! Seriously, have you seen the way they treat your luggage!?

Chinese schools are testing AI that grades papers almost as well as teachers

Some schools in China have incorporated paper-grading artificial intelligence into their classrooms, according to the South China Morning Post. One in every four schools, or about 60,000 institutions, are quietly testing a machine learning-powered system that can score students’ work automatically, and even offer suggestions where appropriate.

The AI, which can be accessed through various online portals, and which the report describes as similar to the system used by the Education Testing Service in the U.S., uses an evolving “knowledge base” to interpret the “general logic” and “meaning” of pupils’ essays and to highlight stylistic, structural, and thematic areas that need improvement. It can read both English and Chinese, and it’s reportedly perceptive enough to notice when paragraphs veer too far off topic.
2018-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story.

CloudQuant Thoughts… But who will you go to if you want to dispute your grade? Seriously, as long as the direction of the education is not interfered with, anything that frees up teachers time will benefit all students.

Understanding the Trust Factor in the Analytics Era

Today, data is increasingly seen as the fuel of the business, rather than its byproduct.

As a result, the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” couldn’t ring truer when it comes to maximizing the value of machine learning in the enterprise, according to Steve Zisk, senior product marketing manager of RedPoint Global, which provides a customer data platform and engagement hub.

Machine learning is worthless if it’s fueled by bad data, according to Zisk, who covered why simply collecting massive amounts of data isn’t enough to extract value from machine learning technology; what’s real and what’s hype when it comes to machine learning; and best practices for using machine learning to predict, identify patterns, and optimize processes for reaching customers effectively.

CloudQuant Thoughts… A lot of people assume ML and AI are the panaceas for all their problems, “just throw ML at it”. But the quality of the data is paramount, as is the structure of the data. In the trading environment huge amounts of data are derived from a simple update of the Bid/Ask or a new Trade – two events of less than 50 characters of data each.

Chris Reuter, North America data warehousing sales leader, IBM, presented a keynote at Data Summit 2018 on the key trends in IT today and what organizations must do to advance their organizations.

Reuter focused on three main themes in the marketplace:

According to IDC, data will see a 30% CAGR through 2025 – that means you have think about how over the next 7 years you are going to deal with 30% CAGR on data. Cognitive systems themselves create all kinds of data and metadata so you have got to be able to store, analyize and govern that data.

According to McKinsey, investment growth in AI has increased 3x since 2013. Getting actual projects into production is hard but we need to infuse cognitive computing and AI into the data, he noted.

According to Gartner, there is value in all approaches to cloud, whether the strategy is pure cloud or not, depending on the enterprise and end goals.

CloudQuant Thoughts… A 30% Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) on data is staggering. We agree wholeheartedly with the Essential Elements and are aiming to make the first Hybrid Trading Data Management system in CloudQuant AI very soon.

AWS’s Recently-Launched Features ‘Transcribe’ And ‘Translate’ Are Using Machine Learning In A Revolutionary Manner

Last month at AWS re:INVENT developers conference, Amazon announced two new services — Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Translate — with an aim to improve the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

Amazon Transcribe can analyse audio files (.wav, .mp3, .flac) stored on Amazon S3. On the other hand, Amazon Translate provides a fast translation of text-based content to create a multilingual experience on the web. It can also simply mass-translate documents on command.

The 4 Machine Learning Skills You Won’t Learn in School or MOOCs

Machine Learning (ML) has become massively popular over the last several years. And why… well simply because it works! The latest research has achieved record breaking results, even surpassing human performance on some tasks. Of course as a result many people are rushing to get into this field; and why not. It’s well funded, the technology is exciting and interesting, and there’s lots of room for growth.

CloudQuant Thoughts… Your model must fit the ‘business requirements’. You must ‘quickly’ select the correct ML modelling type. You MUST fit your model into the current system (no point in building a model that receives yesterday’s market data and takes three hours to crunch if you only get the data two house before the next day opens!). Strive to get the most bang for your buck. For me, all of these fit the classic 80/20 rule.

The one essential skill that will set you apart from other developers

…and how you can hone this skill in five easy ways.

According to the Global Developer Population and Demographic Study conducted by Evans Data Corporation, there are over 22 million developers worldwide and this figure is expected to raise to 26 million in 2022. So. Many. Developers.

If you are one of the 20 something millions developers in the world, you might be wondering how you can set yourself apart from others and stand out from the crowd. Today, I’d like to share with you the one essential skill that is most valued for developers but not every developer possesses or understands its importance. And no, it is not public speaking skill.

It took me a while to come up with an appropriate label for this skill, but I have finally come up one that I am happy with. This essential skill is the ability to “Think and act like a CEO”.

One of the most common questions people ask is which IDE / environment / tool to use, while working on your data science projects. As you would expect, there is a wealth of options available – from language specific IDEs like R Studio, PyCharm to editors like Sublime Text or Atom – the choice can be intimidating for a beginner.

If there is one tool which every data scientist should use or must be comfortable with, it is Jupyter Notebooks.
2018-05-24 11:46:47+05:30 Read the full story.

CloudQuant Thoughts… Our next product, CloudQuant.AI leverages Jupyter Notebooks into a streamlined IDE in a webpage. We will bring you more news soon.

Below The Fold…

Enabling the Real Time Enterprise with Data Lakes, Streaming Data, and the Cloud

oduct management and marketing, Attunity, looked at what it takes to become a real time enterprise and the role of change data capture in enabling the transformation.

As organizations embrace AI and machine learning versus historical views of the past, they are also moving to real time computing and away from batch processing, said Potter.

Traditional approaches included business reporting, batch analysis of data at rest, and use of transactional sources, but modern approaches also incorporate data science and advanced analytics, real-time processing of data in flight, and transactional data as well as new …
2018-05-24 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Career paths in Business Analytics and Data Science World

“Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” is one of the most popular Harvard Business Review (HBR) articles and has inspired tons of people to pursue their careers in the field of analytics. One of the main themes of this article published in HBR was the trend of growing jobs in the analytics industry.

The exact same inference was predicted by IBM recently saying that the number of US data professionals will increase from 364,000 to 2.72 million by 2020!
2018-05-28 08:59:24+05:30 Read the full story.

How Andrew Ng Perceives The AI-Powered World

Andrew Ng is a hero and a role model for everyone who is starting the machine learning journey. One of his earliest Machine Learning courses saw lakhs of students enrolling and getting a huge boost to their careers. He is now back with a course in Deep Learning specialisation supported by his company Deeplearning.ai.

Andrew Ng, one of the foremost artificial intelligence experts, is working hard to train more AI experts on a larger scale who can work across a range of industries. …
2018-05-25 05:05:43+00:00 Read the full story.

Using Machine Learning to Monitor Social Media Crises

Machine learning can be applied to sentiment analysis of unstructured data in the context of social media. As more and more people tap into social media tools to voice positive and negative opinions, it’s important to predict a social media “crisis” before one occurs.

David Weinberger Considers the Benefits and Risks of AI

Data Summit 2018 kicked off this week with a keynote by David Weinberger, senior researcher, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, titled “Once We Know Everything … or Suppose AI is Right?”

Throughout history, it has been the goal of people to use tools to “anticipate and narrow” by taking information, and lessons learned from the past in order to control and prepare for the possibilities that may be encountered again so they can limit risk and increase the potential for success, said Weinberger.

With the arrival of big data, machine learning, data interoperability, and all-to-all connections, machines are changing long-established concepts of what we know and what is able to be known.

Anne Buff and Lynda Partner Explore What it Means to be a Data-Driven Enterprise

Two perspectives on becoming a data driven enterprise were discussed at Data Summit 2018 in presentations by Anne Buff, business solutions manager, SAS Best Practices, SAS Institute; and Lynda Partner, VP, Marketing & Analytics as a Service, Pythian.

The demand to become a data-driven business with a competitive edge in the digital economy is greater now than ever. As we embrace the idea that the analytics economy will power the digital economy …
2018-05-22 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Using Machine Learning to Report News

Machine learning is changing the way we interact with things and each other. As artificial intelligence gains steam, what we know about the world is changing.

Reuters is introducing a new tool called News Tracer. It is a capability that applies AI in journalism to find events breaking on Twitter. It assigns them a newsworthiness score so people can focus on the events that are important.

This Media Startup Is Beating the Competition With a Newsroom Run by Robots

On Feb. 13 last year, the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un was killed in an airport in Malaysia, in what the U.S. Department of State concluded was an assassination using a nerve agent. As North Korea and Malaysia were roiled in a diplomatic dispute, one entrepreneur in Japan and his budding news service were about to reap some attention.

News of Kim Jong-Nam’s death was quickly picked up in Japan not by one of the country’s giant media conglomerates, but by a small startup. JX Press Corp., a news technology venture founded in 2008 by Katsuhiro Yoneshige while he was still a freshman in college, reported the incident more than half an hour faster than the big names, according to one observer. It did so even though it has no journalists, let alone any international bureaus.
2018-05-27 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Qualcomm claims its on-device voice recognition is 95% accurate

At the Re-Work Deep Learning Summit in Boston, Chris Lott, an artificial intelligence researcher at Qualcomm, gave a glimpse into his team’s work on a new voice recognition program.

The system, which works locally on a smartphone or other portable device, comprises two kinds of neural networks: a recurrent neural network (RNN), which uses its internal state, or memory, to process inputs, and a convolutional neural network, a neural network that …
2018-05-25 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Using Asynchronous Method For Deep Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning applications have propelled artificial intelligence to achieve realistic results to a great extent. This can be largely attributed to improved research and developments in areas like neural networks — particularly deep neural networks. The advancements in these networks have led to other areas of ML, like reinforcement learning (RL), to grow parallelly.

AI marks the beginning of the Age of Thinking Machines

Every day brings considerable AI news, from breakthrough capabilities to dire warnings. A quick read of recent headlines shows both: an AI system that claims to predict dengue fever outbreaks up to three months in advance, and an opinion piece from Henry Kissinger that AI will end the Age of Enlightenment. Then there’s the father of AI who doesn’t believe there’s anything to worry about. Robert Downey, Jr. is in the midst of developing an eight-part documentary series about AI to air on Netflix.
2018-05-25 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Microsoft is developing a tool to help engineers catch bias in algorithms

Microsoft is developing a tool that can detect bias in artificial intelligence algorithms with the goal of helping businesses use AI without running the risk of discriminating against certain people.

Rich Caruana, a senior researcher on the bias-detection tool at Microsoft, described it as a “dashboard” that engineers can apply to trained AI models. “Things like transparency, intelligibility, and explanation are new enough to the field that few …
2018-05-25 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Free Ebook Offers Insight on 16 Open Source AI Projects

Open source AI is flourishing, with companies developing and open sourcing new AI and machine learning tools at a rapid pace. To help you keep up with the changes and stay informed about the latest projects, The Linux Foundation has published a free ebook by Ibrahim Haddad examining popular open source AI projects, including Acumos AI, Apache Spark, Caffe, TensorFlow, and others.

“It is increasingly common to see AI as open source projects,” Haddad said. And, “as with any technology where talent …
2018-05-22 12:33:32+00:00 Read the full story.

Equity Market Innovation Leads to Venue Proliferation

Several startups are planning to launch either new venues or order types, and even listing standards, to solve problems in US equity trading.

At last month’s SIFMA Equity Market Structure conference, executives with the following three startups and one established exchange discussed their particular market innovations and how each one fits into the existing equity market structure.

Imperative Execution is on the brink of launching a dark pool t…
2018-05-25 16:25:37 Read the full story.

Microsoft says AI is finally ready for broader use to help solve Earth’s environmental woes

REDMOND, Wash. — Lucas Joppa agrees we’re living in the Information Age. But he wishes that the present tech era wasn’t so navel gazingly focused on Homo sapiens.

“I want an Information Age that encapsulates all information about life on Earth,” said Joppa, who is Microsoft’s first chief environmental scientist — and likely the first chief of this kind anywhere in the tech sector.

“We’ve allowed ourselves to exist in a world where we’re completely flying blind to the rest of the life on Earth,” Joppa said. “We do that at our own peril, and it exhibits an exceptional lack of wonder about where we are and who we are and why we’re here.”
2018-05-23 22:16:19-07:00 Read the full story.

GPU based servers can help solve Big Data energy woes

Big data keeps getting bigger, and companies may think they are reducing their carbon footprint by moving to the Cloud but this move could actually be making things worse for the environment. With each new data center created for big cloud providers, tens of thousands of new racks need to be installed, which translates into a further strain on energy resources.

IBM’s head of Watson likes Elon Musk but ‘hates’ A.I. scaremongering

Warnings of artificial intelligence (AI) posing a threat to humanity are “not helpful,” a top executive at IBM has said.

While critics like Tesla CEO Elon Musk have warned about the risks of developing AI, David Kenny, IBM’s senior vice president of Watson and Cloud, said the technology is already proving to be beneficial.

“The interest in A.I. by corporations is just off the charts,” Giancarlo said on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley.”

“At Pure, we are able to…feed GPUs, high speed applications, and A.I. environments — at the speed they want that data to provide the intelligence companies want to make their businesses better.”

Since A.I. is all about crunching huge amounts of data, older, tiered storage systems that rank data by age aren’t nimble enough to grant researchers quick access to even the oldest data sets, says Giancarlo.

“These days, people want access to data, whether it was last week or last year or last decade. And in order to do that, the data needs to be kept hot,” Giancarlo said. “If you want to look at long term trends and data…you want to be able to mine it for more than a week or two.”

This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as “investment advice” or as a “recommendation” regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The thoughts and opinions on this site do not represent investment recommendations by CloudQuant or Kershner Trading Group. Securities, charts, illustrations and other information contained herein are provided to assist crowd researchers in their efforts to develop algorithmic trading strategies for backtesting on CloudQuant.